SNMREC

SNMREC

Florida Atlantic University

Southeast National Marine Renewable Energy Center

The U.S. Department of Energy designated a center at Florida Atlantic University in 2010 to help marine renewable companies by providing technical, social and economic, and environmental solutions to advance commercial readiness of these projects. A major aspect of the services offered is on- and off-shore testing capability. The Southeast National Marine Renewable Energy Center (SNMREC) is in the process of securing the nation’s first offshore energy lease from the U.S. Department of Interior. This lease will authorize the Center to install “test berths” which can test ocean current turbines up to 100kW in nameplate power production and up to 7 meter total rotor diameters.

In addition, the Center has begun work to design and plan a full-scale turbine testing capability with grid connection to shore. Both scaled facilities will offer not only ISO/IEC 17025-compliant measurement calibration, data handling, and analysis, but data can be collected to comply with international standards under development for marine equipment performance. Both scales of test capability will also offer sufficiently characterized and real-time synchronized resource characterization so that ocean current flows can be properly correlated with turbine performance. These and other projects that SNMREC is involved in can be explored at http://snmrec.fau.edu.

 

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